Picking perfect bracket a tough numbers game

Want to be sure of filling out the perfect March Madness bracket this year? Not possible.

If you were to stack the amount of paper it would take to fill in every bracket with every possibility among the 68 teams who will play 67 games over the next three weeks, it would not fit inside the universe.

So says Michael Weimerskirch, a math professor at Augsburg College, who gets paid to think about numbers and the way they affect the Kentuckys, Butlers and VCUs of the world.

But there’s this glimmer of hope. Weimerskirch says you could start flipping coins. The odds of finding perfection that way – by flipping a coin to pick the winner of every game: 1-in-100,000,000,000,000,000,000. For those keeping score at home, that’s 1-in-100 million trillion.